Fig. 3: MERISH shows that astrocytes from aged mice display different regional enrichment.
From: Aging in mice alters regionally enriched striatal astrocytes
a XY directional map of all cell types identified within the striatal section is shown. Medium spiny neurons, cortical neurons, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, endothelial cells, and microglia are displayed in different colors - each dot represents a cell segmented by MERLIN. All cells within the XY coordinates of the striatum were subset, and here we display the UMAP of these subset striatal cell clusters split by major cell types and UMAP split by age (young = blue; aged = red). b Striatal astrocytes were subset from all striatal cells and clustered separately using the Louvian algorithm. The first UMAP shows striatal astrocyte subtypes from single cells, the second UMAP shows striatal astrocyte subtypes from MERFISH, and the third UMAP shows striatal astrocyte subtypes from integrated single-cell and MERFISH datasets. c–f Top 4 astrocyte subtypes (by abundance) are shown. The astrocyte subtype expression probability is quantified along the dorsal-ventral axis in 500 μm segments in young and aged mice. We divided the striatum into five 500 μm sections, starting at the base of the corpus callosum and moving ventrally. We quantified the density of each astrocyte subtype within each subregion. This astrocyte expression probability quantification was calculated by the number of astrocytes within a subcluster (A1–7), within each 500 μm subregion (0–5) (XA1…A7 within Y0…5) divided by the total number of astrocytes within that 500 μm section (Σtotal) normalized to the total number of astrocytes within each respective subcluster (σA1…A7) ([(XA1,..A7 within Y0…5/Σtotal)/σA1…A7]). The regional change is quantified by subtracting the young astrocyte expression probability from the aged expression probability. These quantifications were statistically analyzed using a two-way repeated measures (for subregion) ANOVA. Asterisks (*) indicate significant differences (p value < 0.05) across sub-regions, and hashtags (#) indicate significant differences across ages. Individual representative astrocyte maps for young and aged striatal sections are displayed to the right of the astrocyte density quantification, with astrocyte subtypes demarcated in their respective colors. In the graphs shown in (c–f), the corpus callosum is abbreviated as CC on the y-axis.
